>And why can't I find any literature about this sort of thing? All the>compiler books I can find say 'Here is reverse polish. Its a good>intermediate representation because its stack-like', but then they go off>and do something completely different.

Try Threaded Interpreted Language (TIL) published by Byte. It is a very
old book (1970's?) discussing the implementation of a language that
looks like Forth. (May be it was Forth's forgotten predecessor?). The
compiled code (as well as the source code) is in RPN. If I remembered
correctly, almost everything, (+, -, if, while, etc) are compiled into
"procedure calls". But I gather performance is not high in your criteria
list. The good thing about TIL is that if you stripped away its editor and
translator, the run-time part that is left is very small.